Studien zur Germanistik, Skandinavistik und Uebersetzungskultur – serie

Travel writing studies have been focused mostly on women travel writers and on representations of the world and the other. This book adopts a novel perspective which diachronically combines the issues of genre and gender. The author postulates that the genre of the travel book in the British literary tradition was established and developed in the eighteenth century alongside the novel and the autobiography. He cogently presents the developments in earlier non-fictional travel narratives in order to expose both their similarities and fundamental differences from modern travel books. Underlying his research is the conviction that the narrative personae of travel books have always been placed in the foreground because of the key role of sentimental discourse and celebrity culture. This book competently analyses the main trends, techniques and constraints in the process of constructing male narrative personae in British travel books written between 1755 and 1939.

The last two decades witnessed an upsurge in Anglo-American studies of Modernism and its translation practices. The book revisits the notion of Modernist translation in the context of Eastern European (Polish and Russian) literatures. The framework of this study is informed by the cultural turn in Translation Studies and the dynamic concept of Modernism as a configuration of mutually antagonistic and dialogic tendencies, currents, programs, attitudes, and artistic realizations. Along with the analysis of illusionist and anti-illusionist models of Modernist translation, the book readdresses the problems of carnivalization, parodicity, estrangement, conceptualism and topics of translation discourse.

The book addresses the relationship between the literary representations of North Greenland and the Inughuit people in Knud Rasmussen’s expedition accounts The New People and My Travel Diary and the historical process of Danish colonization of North Greenland. The aim of reading both works is to demonstrate the ambivalence in representing North Greenland and the Inughuit, and, through this, to prove the existence of common mechanisms and cultural practices connected to mapping of the Other in a situation of asymmetric power relations. Applying a textual approach founded on colonial discourse analysis, the reading proves that literary mappings of geography and identity can never be stable, as they are in the state of constant transformation, perpetually recontextualized and reinvented.

The book is a comparative study of the works of Jzef Wittlin and Pär Lagerkvist, in their youth recognized as prominent expressionist writers, and in their later years making the ethical topic the core of their works. In search for ways of expressing ethical dilemmas, the works of Sren Kierkegaard and his concept of indirect communication turned out to be an extraordinarily powerful tool for both writers, enabling them to explore the matters of ethics and morals in a way substantially different from traditional didactic literature. In the reading of Wittlins and Lagerkvists works undertaken in this book, the perspectives of comparative studies and the history of literature complement and make it possible to describe an important, but rarely recognized phenomenon of modern European literature: its ethical variant.

The bipartite work titled Philosophical and Translatological Wanderings in Moominvalley explores Tove Jansson’s renowned children’s classic to illumine its inherent double-address mode. Part one discusses the plentiful philosophi-cal hypotexts of the Moomin series, ranging from Parmenides to Westermarck and geared to an adult readership. Part two examines the Polish translation of anthroponyms, humour and cuisine terms as central to the Moominvalley idiom and the poetics of the saga. By identifying translation techniques and linguistic shifts, the author provides comparative insights into how the source and target texts address their respective audiences. By highlighting the triumphs and failures of the Polish Moomin books, the argument spells out the implications of double address for translation and translation studies.